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Playing Texas Hold’em Poker for real money online

With this article I will attempt to give a practical guide to getting started with online poker, or more specifically online Texas Hold’em. I will also try to give some global advice concerning the strategies you need for playing Hold’em online to avoid unnecessary losses in the learning phase.

A desire for improvement

When you play poker or want to play poker, you will experience very different situations during a session. You might also have a full session where everything goes your way, but given you play more sessions over time or are not very lucky; you will experience ups and downs and what is known as “bad beats” and more.
If you are anything like me, you will wonder how to improve your chances of winning or at least improve your skills to a higher level to minimize losses. Having played in real life several times with both losses and wins and also having tried online gaming with play money, I had been considering online gaming for real money for a while.

Choosing a place to play, the “Poker Room”

There are many pokerrooms to choose from, I myself played my first play money games on a site called HoldemPoker.com because a colleague of mine recommended it being free and without download. Later they merged with PokerRoom.com and I automatically became a member there. That’s probably why I started looking at them as a possible place to make my first deposit but I have since learnt that there is a number of deciding factors you should consider when choosing where to make your first deposit.

Starting to play

In the following I will assume you already understand the basic rules and betting structure of the game, if you don’t there are many sites with beginners guides and almost all online poker rooms has very detailed instructions for the game itself.
Most poker rooms offer many different games (also other than Hold’em but I will only describe Hold’em) and the two main categories are Cash games and Tournaments. In Cash games you can choose between Fixed Limit (FL), Pot Limit (PL) and No Limit (NL). All three games behave very differently because of the betting structure which will affect the importance of bluffing and being short stacked (At least to some extent). Choosing the right game is very important and for newcomers I think FL is the better choice to start at, and probably at the lowest blinds possible to minimize losses in the learning phase.

Strategies for Texas Hold'em

I will soon provide some detailed strategies for both cash games and tournaments, but for now I have collected some universal guidelines, by some even considered cliches. Even so I highly recommend you read them and abide by them while you are learning the inner workings of this grat game.

Some example Texas Hold'em hands

While playing I have saved some example hands from my own playing, some are examples of good play, others are examples of how not to do - which I unfortunately didn't in the case.